This week's SpaceX IPO set aside nearly 30% of the shares for the retail investor, an unusual proportion: the rule is usually 5 to 10%. In parallel, new business applications in the United States rose 24% year over year in the first quarter of 2026. More people than ever want in, and access —to capital, to customers, to market— looks like the barrier.
In 1985, Howard Schultz, raised in a Brooklyn housing project, wanted to open a coffee-shop chain. He pitched his idea to 242 investors, one by one, in face-to-face meetings, over more than a year. 217 said no. With the 25 yeses he raised $1.6 million and opened Il Giornale, the seed of what today is a nearly hundred-billion-dollar company.
The comfortable reading: "To get started you need a network, contacts, someone to open the door for you. Schultz knew people. I don't know anyone."
It's the most reassuring excuse, because it puts the barrier outside you.
This isn't about having contacts.
It's about how the cost of reaching the right person collapsed, and almost no one has updated their idea of what it costs:
1. Schultz paid for access in time and shoe leather. 242 in-person meetings don't happen in a week. They're months of travel, of waiting rooms, of hearing no to your face and going home to prepare the next one. The bottleneck wasn't his idea: it was how many physical doors one man could knock on in a day. That constraint defined who could even try.
2. Today the 242 doors are knocked on at once. The same pitch Schultz took a year to deliver reaches thousands of the right investors on a platform today, in days. And the same goes for customers: selling no longer requires a buyer to receive you in their office. Reaching people stopped being a problem of feet and schedule. It's a problem of having something worth sending.
3. When access was expensive, it filtered by stamina, not by merit. Whoever could endure 217 noes won, whether or not they had the best idea. Now that reaching is cheap, the filter moved: it's no longer whoever survives the most doors, it's whoever says something worth opening one. The obstacle stopped being on the road and moved to what you have to say when you arrive.
For years, "I don't have contacts" was an honest reason not to start. Knocking on doors cost so much that, without a starting network, almost no one could.
That reason expired without many noticing. So the question is uncomfortable: if today you can reach more people from home than Schultz reached in a year of meetings, is it still true that what you lack is access, or do you now only lack something to say?
When reaching people stops being expensive, the value shifts to what's said and to who helps say it. A chain:
Anyone can contact thousands today, and that's why almost everyone sounds the same and ignorable. Whoever can turn a message into one worth answering has a scarce skill exactly when everyone has the channel.
Schultz needed an investor to receive him. Today there are lists, platforms and communities where those people already are. Creating or curating that meeting point —where whoever offers and whoever decides cross paths— is a business in itself.
Plenty of people with something good to sell don't know how to distribute it. The service that puts their product in front of the right people has immediate demand.
The question isn't who you know. It's: what specific door that used to be knocked on in person now opens from a screen, and are you using it or still waiting for an introduction?
Schultz needed a year and 242 doors to find 25 yeses. You have those 242 doors open at once, from a desk. It stopped being a problem of who you know. It became one of what you say when you walk in.